It was a couple of weeks back, and like my reading of Pamuk, the event has already begun to subside into the fog – the French psychoanalyst Caroline Eliacheff, one of the writers on the panel that night, isn't the only one to suffer from a poor memory. But I'm sure Swiss novelist Bernard Comment started off with a claim that for him writing is a "stubborn regaining of the past", an attempt "to engrave time somewhere", despite its "relentless flow" partly because he wrote that bit down, or engraved it, if you prefer, right here. The Polish writer Hubert Klimko agreed that as a novelist he fights a daily battle against "memory … also against time", but went on to claim that for the novelist, the most important memories are those you make up. He said he called Les Toutes Premières Choses a "novel" precisely to blur the question of how much or how little of his life story he had invented – while insisting that the three wildly different and increasingly baroque accounts of the day he was born were "nothing but the truth", as he claims in the introduction, since he remembered each one of them clearly.

The US novelist Francisco Goldman admitted he also called Say Her Name, his portrait of his late wife Aura, a "novel" as a way of avoiding the memoir police, but for him the moments he invented were more than just artistic licence. By making up something that Aura really would have done, or finding exactly the turn of phrase she would have used he was in some sense claiming her back. Or at least that's what I remember him saying.

Now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure what Pamuk said was that novels are machines for collecting memories, or at least moments, which seems to come to much the same thing – though perhaps someone will correct me if I've remembered that wrong. But he also said – and I'm certain of this because I can link to it right here – that the paradox at the heart of fiction, the engine that drives it, is the tension between the knowledge that what you're reading is all made up and the overwhelming feeling that it's all true. "Even if I say: 'This is fiction, it's all imaginary,'" says Pamuk, "I don't want you to believe it." So maybe the link between memory and fiction is that fiction relies on memory to create that sense of authenticity without which we wouldn't care whether Sydney Carton lives or dies, whether Elizabeth will see through Darcy's pride. But when writing begins to rely on memory for more than that, when the reader can't confidently assert that this is all made up, then we have left fiction behind and are moving towards memoir.

In Say Her Name, Goldman examines his late wife's unpublished fiction, looking for clues to her life in her drafts, her notes. Barthesians may shake their heads at this all-too-human reaction to the death of the author, but perhaps the fact they were still unfinished holds out the hope that these stories contain traces of the author that can still be made out, that the memories which had in some way inspired them can be caught before they have made the transition into fiction.